Woman's work in America

by Unknown

The cultivation of specialties, and the development of esprit de corps among women, all predict the day, when, through this might-conserving force of motherhood introduced into every department of human activity, the common weal shall be the individual care; war shall rank among the lost arts; nationality shall mean what Edward Bellamy’s wonderful book, entitled “Looking Backward,” sets before us as the fulfillment of man’s highest earthly dream; and Brotherhood shall become the talismanic word and realized estate of all humanity.

In concluding this portion of my article I cannot better express my view of what we are, and what we may be, than by the following quotation from my address before the Woman’s Congress at its meeting in Des Moines, Ia., 1885:

Humanly speaking, such success as we have attained has resulted from the following policy and methods:

1. The simplicity and unity of the organization. The local union is a miniature of the national, having similar officiary and plan of work. It is a military company carefully mustered, officered, and drilled. The county union is but an aggregation of the locals and the district of the counties, while each State is a regiment, and the national itself is womanhood’s “Grand Army of the Republic.”

2. Individual responsibility is everywhere urged. “Committees are obsolete to us, and each distinct line of work has one person, called a superintendent, who is responsible for its success in the local, and another in the State, and a third in the National union. She may secure such lieutenants as she likes, but the union looks to her for results, and holds her accountable for failures.

3. The quick and cordial recognition of talent is another secret of W. C. T. U. success. Women, young or old, who can speak, write, conduct meetings, organize, keep accounts, interest children, talk with the drinking man, get up entertainments, or carry flowers to the sick or imprisoned, are all pressed into the service. There has been also in our work an immense amount of digging in the earth to find one’s own buried talent, to rub off the rust and to put it out at interest. Perhaps that is, after all, its most significant feature, considered as a movement.

4. Subordination of the financial phase has helped, not hindered us. Lack of funds has not barred out even the poorest from our sisterhood. A penny per week is our basis of membership; of which a fraction goes to the State, and ten cents to the National W. C. T. U. Money has been, and I hope may be, a consideration altogether secondary. Of wealth we have had incomputable stores; indeed, I question if America has a richer corporation to-day than ours; wealth of faith, of enthusiasm, of experience, of brain, of speech, of common sense—this is a capital stock that can never depreciate, needs no insurance, requires no combination lock or bonded custodian, and puts us under no temptation to tack our course or trim our sails.

5. Nothing has helped us more than the entire freedom of our society from the influence or dictation of capitalists, politicians, or corporations of any sort whatever. This cannot be too strongly emphasized as one of the best elements of power. Indeed, it may be truly said that this vast and systematic work has been in no wise guided, molded, or controlled by men. “It has not even occurred to them to offer advice until within a year, and to accept advise has never occurred to us, and I hope never will. While a great many noble men are ‘honorary members,’ and in one or two sporadic instances men have acted temporarily as presidents of local unions at the South, I am confident our grand constituency of temperance brothers rejoice almost as much as we do in the fact that we women have from the beginning gone our own gait and acted according to our own sweet will. They would bear witness, I am sure, to the fact that we have never done this flippantly, or in a spirit of bravado, but with great seriousness, asking the help of God. I can say personally what I believe our leaders would also state as their experience, that so strongly do good men seem to be impressed that the call to Christian women in the Crusade was of God, and not of man, that in the eleven years of my almost uninterrupted connection with the National W. C. T. U. I have hardly received a letter of advice or a verbal exhortation from minister or layman, and I would mildly but firmly say that I have not sought their counsel.” The hierarchies of the land will be ransacked in vain for the letterheads of the W. C. T. U. We have sought, it is true, the help of almost every influential society in the nation, both religious and secular; we have realized how greatly this help was needed by us, and grandly has it been accorded; but what we asked for was an indorsement of plans already made and work already done. Thus may we always be a society “of the women, by the women,” but for humanity.

6. The freedom from red-tape and the keeping out of ruts is another element of power. We practice a certain amount of parliamentary usage, and strongly urge the study of it as a part of the routine of local unions. We have good, strong “constitutions,” and by-laws to match; blanks for reports; rolls for membership; pledges in various styles of art; badges, ribbons, and banners, and hand-books of our work, are all to be had at “national headquarters,” but we will not come under a yoke of bondage to the paraphernalia of the movement. We are always moving on. “Time cannot dull nor custom stale our infinite variety.” We are exceedingly apt to break out in a new phase. Here we lop off an old department, and there we add two new ones. Our “new departures” are frequent and oftentimes most unexpected. Indeed, we exhibit the characteristics of an army on the march rather than an army in camp or hospital.

The marked esprit de corps is to be included among the secrets of success. The W. C. T. U. has invented a phrase to express this, and it is “comradeship among women.” So generous and so cherished has this comradeship become that ours is often called a “mutual admiration society.” We believe in each other, stand by each other, and have plenty of emulation without envy. Sometimes a State or an individual says to another, “The laurels of Miltiades will not suffer me to sleep;” but there is no staying awake to belittle success; we do not detract from any worker’s rightful meed of praise. So much for the “hidings of power” in the W. C. T. U.